We form our ideas about marriage and human relationships either through personal experience or from literature.

And yet, marriage and literature are like two very flammable chemicals – mix them together and you’ve got plenty of Breaking Bad drama. And usually, it all ends in tears and blood.

Take Rochester and Bertha’s marriage in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre – it’s a secondary plot within the context of the novel, and yet the turmoil is nuclear. Then there are Kitty and Walter in W. Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil. It’s a marriage made in hell, and when Kitty has an affair, Walter drags her with him to a cholera-ridden part of China. Talk of revenge. As for Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler’s marriage in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, it’s a tempestuous affair, echoing the sound of civil war outside the window.

Down the classics route, the marriage between Francesca and Gianciotto Malatesta in Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy can only end in murder and an eternity of frustration, while Ovid’s Orpheus and Eurydice are doomed by one fatal look. And Flaubert’s Emma Bovary reacts to her loveless union with Charles by doing her very best to cause her own destruction.

But enough of broken hearts. Rather than dwell on tragic marriages, let’s celebrate the ones which rhyme.

Romeo and Juliet

Yes, Shakespeare’s masterpiece is indeed a tragedy. And yet, why has the story of the two star-crossed lovers from Verona become the master plot of love?

Simple – despite the fatal duels between the two families, the woe in the Capulet crypt and the lovers’ untimely deaths, Romeo and Juliet’s short-lived marriage is a beautiful meteor. The balcony scene in itself makes it all worth it.

Pip and Estella

The number 13 is unlucky for some, lucky for others. Charles Dickens certainly belongs to the latter camp because Great Expectations, the great Victorian author’s 13th novel, is arguably his most accomplished.

Romeo and Juliet’s short-lived marriage is a beautiful meteor

There is just one curious incident with the ending. In the original, Pip meets Estella in London. While Pip has remained single, Estella, after her first husband Bentley Drummle died, has remarried. After a brief conversation, the two part. Yet, as the story goes, Wilkie Collins, a close friend of Dickens, criticised the ending and Dickens revised it. The new ending – “I saw no shadow of another parting from her” – leads us to believe that the two will live happily ever after.

Over the years, the merits of the revised ending have been argued by many critics. George Bernard Shaw wrote how the novel’s “beginning is unhappy; its middle is unhappy; and the conventional happy ending is an outrage on it”.

But let’s be incurable romantics and applaud the happy ending.

Odysseus and Penelope

We would like to think that we, or rather Gozo, contributed to this classic pair’s joy. After being torn apart by war, Odysseus and Penelope wait 20 years to be reunited. And while Odysseus goes on his epic journey, Penelope resists the 108 suitors anxious to replace her husband.

On his return, Odysseus kills the suitors and reclaims his wife’s hand. It’s Homer’s literary proof that true love is worth waiting for, and that being a suitor in Ancient Greece was a dangerous job.

Enrique and Margaret

The title of Rafael Yglesias’s novel says it all – A Happy Marriage. The winner of the 2009 Los Angeles Times book prize begins in the 1970s, when 21-year-old Enrique Sabas meets Margaret Cohen in his Greenwich Village apartment. After a night of cheap wine and witty banter, Margaret manages to snap “his brittle heart”. The second chapter opens on one night, three decades later. Margaret, now Enrique’s wife, is breathing her last after a three-year battle with cancer. She asks him to help her die. Tougher than that is for the two to accept that after 27 years of marriage, the two are going to part.

It’s a sad ending, especially considering that, like his character, Yglesias was married for almost 30 years to his wife Margaret, until her death in 2004. And yet, it is death that brings Enrique and Margaret together in an enduring embrace.